This sense of honor is the sense of right. It is the soul's instinctive love for the good, the true, the commendable, and its instinctive scorn of the base, mean, and vile. There is a confusion between that false honor which cares only what another thinks or says, and the true personal honor which cares first for what we are. It is too true that many a man who would resent with a blow the epithet of "thief" or "liar" will lie and steal in secret apparently without a qualm of conscience. The true root of honor demands reality and hates shams. One should be taught to abhor and reject in his own heart everything which he would resent in an accusation made by another. He should learn not to tolerate in his own inner consciousness what he would fear or blush to have known to friends or foes. This is the sense of personal honor that dominates and molds character and that endures the heaviest stress of life.

The weakness of humanity is our blindness, a cultural blind spot which some call ignorance, in which a selfish and immature ego claims the world as ours and prevents us from seeing ourselves as a part of the world. Kinship with all life is a biological (evolutionary) fact, but our culture ways of doing, perceiving and relating, blind us to this reality.